Denmark

Lars Plougmann/Flickr

If you aren't going to have a kid for your own family, Danes are told, at least do it for Denmark.

No, literally, do it for Denmark.

The small Nordic country has such a low fertility rate — about 1.73 children per woman — that Spies Rejser, a Danish travel company, has come up with ingenious incentives to persuade women to get pregnant.

Russia

Can anyone blame him? As Tech Insider recently reported, the country is experiencing a perfect demographic storm. Men are dying young. HIV/AIDS and alcoholism are crippling the country. And women aren't having babies.

The problem got so bad that in 2007 Russia declared September 12 the official Day of Conception.

On the Day of Conception, people get the day off to focus on having kids. Women who give birth exactly nine months later, on June 12, win a refrigerator.

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Japan

Katsuhito Nojiri/Flickr

Japan's fertility rate has been below replacement since 1975.

To offset that decades-long trend, in 2010 a group of students from the University of Tsukuba introduced Yotaro, a robot baby that gives couples a preview of parenthood.

If men and women begin thinking of themselves as potential fathers and mothers, the students theorized, they'll feel emotionally ready to take a stab at the real thing.

The idea was: If you weren't contributing to the communist state by creating future laborers, you had to contribute with dollars instead.

The 1980s weren't much better, however — women faced forced gynecological exams that were performed by "demographic command units" to ensure pregnancies went to term. When Romanian leadership changed in 1989, the brutal policy finally came crashing down. But at 1.31 children per woman, the fertility rate is still well below replacement.

India

India as a whole has no problem with fertility — the country's ratio of 2.48 children per woman is well above replacement.

But the number of people in India's Parsis community is dwindling — it shrank from roughly 114,000 people in 1941 to just 61,000 in 2001, according to the 2001 census.

That problem led to a series of provocative ads in 2014, including one that read "Be responsible — don't use a condom tonight." Another, geared toward men who lived at home, asked, "Isn't it time you broke up with your Mum?"

The ads seem to be working: By the latest measure, the population has inched back to 69,000.

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Italy

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With a fertility rate of 1.43 — well below the European average of 1.58 — Italy has taken a controversial approach to encourage citizens to have more kids.

Hong Kong

With a fertility rate of just 1.18 children per woman, Hong Kong faces the same challenge as many industrialized countries: Without enough young people to replace aging citizens, populations are dwindling and economic growth is slowing.